


daydreamers please wake up

by yeswayappianway



Category: DCU (Comics), Far Sector (DC Comics 2019)
Genre: Claustrophobia, Gen, Horror, Outer Space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:01:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28145028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeswayappianway/pseuds/yeswayappianway
Summary: “Lantern Mullein,” the electronic voice said. “There has been a report of an abandoned spacecraft drifting in Sector 3047. You are the closest Lantern currently available. Please inspect the craft, and report your findings. A growing number of transports have seen it, and many have been concerned. You will find all the information the Corps has transmitted to your datapad. Be well.” The hologram blinked out.Jo sighed. There went her vacation. Then again, she’d never done well on vacation—too much to do, not enough time to enjoy it all. Maybe she was a workaholic. So what.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 4
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	daydreamers please wake up

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HandmaidenOfHorror](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HandmaidenOfHorror/gifts).



> this was my first time trying to write horror, so i hope i did it justice. i'm super glad to get a chance to write Far Sector fic because i am absolutely living for this comic every month (or... however often dc is releasing it lol)
> 
> thank you SO much to my beta for serving as a wonderful rubber duck and also for helping me figure out what i still needed <3
> 
> title from Sincerely, Jane by (of course) Janelle Monae

It would be cliche to say that the ship was quiet— _too_ quiet—but that didn’t change the fact that it was too damn quiet. Jo could hear the tap of her boots on the metal of the corridor, the slight mechanized hum of the machinery of the ship keeping air circulating and artificial gravity running, and nothing else. The lights glowed overhead, the doors sprang open when she pushed buttons. Everything seemed to be in good working order. The ship was just completely, impossibly empty.

Jo had gotten the call a few days ago while on a self-imposed vacation. After wrapping up in the City Enduring, she’d hopped a transport to a hub world, close enough to book easy passage but still far enough away from Earth to give her the distance she still felt like she needed. She’d spent the thirty-six hours they were in transit cooped up in her quarters, power ring firmly out of sight, hair wrapped up, pajamas on, snacks in hand, and she’d alternated between sleeping and reading fic. It wasn’t… she thought it was supposed to feel refreshing, that’s what self-care was for, right? But mostly, Jo had just felt relief. No one’s lives were in her hands and no one was waiting for her on the other end of the journey. She could just be herself, however she wanted that to look right now.

Kiozuno was busy, and Jo found it easy to lose herself in the spaceport, exploring it on foot and on the insectoid platforms that seemed to serve as public transit here. It was fun to get to be in a new place and explore it for its own sake rather than as a crime scene. Didn’t stop her from spotting a few likely places that trouble might pop up, but she didn’t think she’d lose that instinct any time soon, and so she cataloged the information and moved on. There seemed to be food stalls of one sort or another all over, and she spotted a Karnan stall and bought some sort of kebab to eat as she walked. If this was going to be her life—and wasn’t that a whole conversation in itself—then she ought to take some time to familiarize herself with the rest of the galaxy.

That night, she’d been checking news feeds from Earth when she’d gotten a ping on her ring. It lit up and chimed, almost like a cell phone (something Jo was pretty sure was the ring adapting to her, and not a programmed feature, but it was still pretty funny to think of the Guardians making ringtones), and Jo grabbed it to play the message.

“Lantern Mullein,” the electronic voice said. “There has been a report of an abandoned spacecraft, a long-range crewed cargo ship, name designation: the Zern’ha, drifting in Sector 3047. You are the closest Lantern currently available. Please inspect the craft and report your findings. A growing number of transports have seen it, and many have been concerned. You will find all the information the Corps has transmitted to your datapad. Be well.” The hologram blinked out.

Jo sighed. There went her vacation. Then again, she’d never done well on vacation. Too much to do, not enough time to enjoy it all. Maybe she was a workaholic. So what.

She’d left the next morning, finding a short-range transport service in the spaceport that was willing to take her to the last known location of the Zern’ha. There had been a few other passengers on the ship, and the captain (a member of a species called Ghus) had told her that they had time to wait for two hours as she explored the ship. The crew had been all on board the last time the Zern’ha had picked up cargo, and now here Jo was, walking through a dead ship, looking for any trace of whatever might have happened.

Jo took a moment and followed the curve of the corridor until she spotted a viewport on her right. She looked out at the expanse of space, and craned her head until she could catch a glimpse of the ship that had brought her here. Good—still there, offensively orange against the dark vastness of space. Advertising was the same everywhere, which was a weirdly comforting thought.

The further she walked in the ship, the more intrigued Jo was. When she’d come this way, she’d been expecting a disabled ship, something like wreckage in the ocean that just hadn’t been able to sink, maybe dead occupants. She hadn’t been expecting what was, to her moderately-trained eye, a perfectly working spacecraft that had just… stopped. She snorted, thinking of the horrible movie she’d seen about the rapture. Maybe everyone had just been lifted away, off the ship and into some cartoony wonderland. It’d be about as plausible as everything else she was thinking at the moment.

The thing was, Jo wasn’t a spacecraft expert. She’d never been off-planet before accepting the ring, which seemed obvious enough, since the overwhelming majority of humans had never been off-planet, but definitely put her in the minority among the Corps. Other species had been gallivanting all over space for millenia, as it turned out, and humans were just homebodies. Jo didn’t mind, exactly, but it did make her less than ideal for this job. She’d figured, though, that it was more like theft reports. You go, you find out what was missing, you get the information, and you make a record in case through some act of god the missing thing turns up, but mostly you fill out some paperwork and call it a day. ‘Spaceship disabled, a few bodies on board, ran out of gas, end of discussion.’ Instead, she’d found a mystery, and ultimately, Jo had never been able to resist a mystery.

She knew there were technologies that could teleport people, so it was possible that the ship had been crewed at one point, and they had all gone missing. But it seemed surprising that nothing about the craft would have gone wrong if the crew had really just disappeared and it had been floating for over an Earth week now. Maybe if she could get to the… steering wheel? Obviously not a literal one, but the cockpit, or the navigation room, or wherever she could find that might tell her where the ship had been headed, then maybe she could figure out some place to start looking.

The ship wasn’t large, but whoever had built it had managed to cram a whole lot of space into the limited area inside the hull. Ceilings rose and fell, and corners turned at aggressively sharp angles, and rooms were made in three- or five- or eight-sided shapes. It reminded Jo of being a kid, trying to fit blocks back into a box only made to contain them in one perfect configuration. It also meant there were a lot of corners where something or someone could be hiding.

Jo hadn’t found a single locked door yet. Were the people who had lived on this ship just not big believers in privacy, or had something happened to open them all? She took a deep breath, focusing on the ring. It—it was hard to describe how the ring felt. It wasn’t a physical vibration, nor was it an audible hum, but she could feel the ring’s power all the same. It was fine, she thought. If anything went wrong, she could keep herself surrounded with the ring for long enough to make it back to the transport ship. She was sure she’d seen one of the other Lanterns doing that before, one of the many times she’d ignored them on the news, thinking these wild doings so out of her experience. Sometimes Jo laughed at herself for that, but this wasn’t one of them. Now she just wished she’d known more.

The silence was beginning to grate. The only sounds were her boots on the metal, the occasional slide of her fingers against a button. Was it just a space thing? Jo still hadn’t spent a lot of time in space—she was starting to get a handle on alien planets and worlds and constructed city stations, but there was something about being in this drifting, isolated spaceship that felt much less surrounded than any of those. More alien. “It’s just the quiet,” Jo said out loud. She hoped the sound would break the tension building in the back of her head and in her shoulders. It didn’t.

Up ahead she could see a larger room, no door between the corridor she was in and whatever it opened onto. Once she stepped through, she thought she was in a mess hall of sorts. It was small, but there was something that sure looked like a fancy microwave, and there were tables set low to the ground and bolted to the floor. That part she recognized: all furniture in ships this small was attached. Just like the space shuttles she’d watched as a kid. Who didn’t want to be an astronaut? Well, Jo had only wanted to be an astronaut for about two days when she was eight, after seeing Mae Jemison on tv but before being told that astronauts had to listen to their bedtimes even as adults, but here she was anyway. Life was funny like that.

The mess hall was empty, too. No food out, no dishes either. The tables were empty, and so was the counter that ran the length of the right side of the room. It was unlikely, then, that whoever had been on this ship vanished abruptly. Someone would have been eating, or at the very least would have left their alien-equivalent coffee mug out.

The further Jo walked through this ship, the more she thought that it was probably good that she was here. She’d thought that it was a bit cheap, sending a Lantern to move a spaceship, but she’d figured it was like parking duty ( _was_ parking duty, really), and after the mess with the Emotion Exploit, it hadn’t seemed like the worst idea to do something simple and easily accomplished. Now, though… 

She took out one of the recorders CanHaz had given her as a parting gift. Might as well start her report now. Talking in a low voice, Jo dictated what she had seen as she made her way through the ship. The mess hall wasn’t really any more comforting than the rest of the ship, but at least it was rectangular and the floor and ceiling didn’t slope. She kept the device running as she finished her recap and made her way out into the corridor on the other side.

There was a T-junction ahead of her, two paths branching off as the hall dead-ended. “Left,” Jo said clearly into the mic. She was confident she wouldn’t forget which way she’d gone, but you never knew when a record of your path would come in handy. Left turned out to slope slightly and curve a bit as it went, with the doors Jo had come to expect lining the hall at uneven intervals. She found two supply closets and an unoccupied bedroom. The bedroom had furnishings that seemed to indicate a personal touch, but there was no sign that anyone had been there recently. The bed folded down from the wall, and it was currently latched up neatly. Feeling a little like she was going through a dead person’s things, Jo opened the drawers on the other side of the room. Clothes, nothing unusual, although they weren’t human shaped.

It didn’t take her long to get through the whole room. There was nothing unusual. More to the point, there was no secret diary or holo-recording or anything else that would give Jo a hint as to what the ship’s crew had been doing before… whatever had happened had happened.

Back in the hallway, Jo looked both ways. She thought she saw a light blink back the way she came, and she thought it was probably the lights on the door controls to the mess hall. Continuing on down the corridor, she passed a few more doorways, all open to similar looking bedrooms. There didn’t seem much sense in checking them since Jo couldn’t see anything different from that first room. 

Shortly, she came to a Y-split in the corridor, one of the branches immediately turning into cramped stairs going down and taking a sharp turn so that Jo couldn’t see more than fifteen feet beyond her. The other branch seems to curve back the way she came, so probably the other way she could have gone from the mess hall. Jo stared at the stairs for a minute before sighing and heading down them, although not before shining some light from her ring, just in case the lighting was bad. She also recorded another note on her device, making sure to note the stairs. Jo didn’t think she’d been to the lower level yet. In fact, she was a little surprised that a ship this small could even have a lower level, but it wasn’t impossible.

Jo had to duck as she walked down, and the top of her hair brushed up against the ceiling. If she spread her arms at all, her elbows knocked against the industrial metal wall of the stairwell. She turned for a second time on the stairs and saw that the stairs ended at a closed door. It was a good thing she had the light from the ring, because the light from the top of the stairs barely made it down here and this door had a more complicated-looking mechanism keeping it closed.

Tentatively, Jo stuck her left hand out and pushed the big button on the protruding section in the middle of the door. There was a drawn-out groaning noise, and then the door slid to the side.

It seemed that this was some sort of cargo hold. Cramped, full of metal crates and boxes and one or two cylinders that reminded Jo of oil drums. There were two lights set in the ceiling, and they had a distinctly blue-ish cast. At least they weren’t flickering, Jo thought. That would be just too cliche. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the further she went in this ship, the more she was walking into a horror movie. _You’d never catch me doing any of that shit_ , she remembered saying once in college. _There’s a reason horror movies are always full of white people._ And yet, here she was.

The first box opened easily and seemed to be filled with ration bars. Jo had seen the sort back on the shuttle she’d taken to get to Kiozuno, so she closed the box up again. The next crate had some sort of electronics. Tablets, or the outer space variation on them, maybe. If someone had taken out the crew to steal, presumably they would have taken these—so either something else had happened to the crew, or there had been something more valuable that had been targeted. One of the cylindrical containers was open and lying sideways on the ground, but the other, despite unsealing with a hiss when Jo opened it, was empty. 

After another crate of rations, Jo gave up on finding anything useful in the containers. There were too many variables. She didn’t even know what to look for. Looking around the edges of the room, she wondered if maybe there was a cargo manifest of some sort. She started skirting the walls. Maybe there was a computer terminal? Presumably they wouldn’t be writing on paper, but… there. Jo hurried over to the lightly glowing screen set into the wall, her footsteps loud in the silence. Maybe she could finally get some answers about what had happened on this ship.

When she tapped the screen, it lit up with bright green characters. She didn’t recognize them, but the ring informed her it said “Records.” Jo gave the screen another poke. It flashed brightly—she winced—and then changed to a screen that seemed to be requesting a password. Well, shit. The ring didn’t offer any useful hints. “Fuck,” Jo said out loud, just to hear something. Just when she’d thought she might get a lead.

Jo turned and scanned the room again. The same set of crates and boxes, a few with open lids, and the same blue lights. The open door on the other side where she’d entered. How was she supposed to find a damn thing when the entire ship seemed to be so normal and boring as to be almost painful?

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a shimmer near the ceiling. Jo looked up sharply, but there was nothing there. She studied the area near the light, waiting to see if anything moved. She didn’t dare move or even breathe. After so long and so much of the ship explored, surely something moving could only be whatever had made the crew vanish. 

Nothing happened. Jo turned her head, unfocused and staring in the direction of the far wall. Maybe it was faint enough that she could only see it out of her peripheral vision.

Still nothing. “Fuck,” Jo repeated, and stomped back to the door. She didn’t close the door behind her, but if it had been slammable, she might have considered it. The staircase up seemed even smaller now, looming over her head. Getting back up the stairs to the open corridor was a relief—at least now she could spread her arms. Jo stretched lightly, just for the hell of it. The corridor to her left probably led back to the mess hall. For lack of a better option, she took it.

The same kinds of doors lined this hallway, which did seem to be curving back to the junction outside of the mess hall. Jo opened one of the doors to break up the time. The longer she walked around this ship, the more familiar it started to seem. It was messing with her, making it harder to actively think about what she was seeing instead of writing it off as normal—and it was starting to get boring. This room looked much like the others she’d poked into. The bed was folded against the wall, the few personal belongings were neatly tucked away into shelving, and the closet, when Jo opened it, was full of the same neutral-tone non-human clothing. What was she _missing_?

Back in the hallway, Jo paused for a minute, looking back the way she’d come. Had it been brighter earlier? The lights were dim now. Maybe the ship had an automatic day-night cycle. If that was still running, though, that meant that the full systems of the ship were still running. If it were on emergency power, surely extraneous lighting effects would have been turned off?

The quiet of the ship pressed down on Jo. She’d thought, after the racist shitshow that had been her last partner back in NYC, she’d never work with anyone else again, and the City Enduring hadn’t done much to change that feeling. This, though… this made her want someone at her back. Someone she could call in if things went sour. Did Lanterns ever work with partners? She couldn’t remember ever seeing them working together on the news back on Earth. They’d showed up with the Justice League occasionally, maybe, but… that wasn’t in the cards for her. Maybe it was different out here, a sector so distant the Guardians rotated people through one at a time. Or maybe this wasn’t normal, and it was special treatment just for her.

There was a noise behind Jo. She whirled, ring flaring out with unformed thought, but there was nothing there, just the blinking light on the button next to the door. It had closed behind her, she realized. Shaking her head, Jo turned back the way she’d been going. How was she this jumpy? The ship wasn’t even creepy, just quiet. She still hadn’t spent a lot of time on spaceships, though, so maybe this was just the remnants of a normal adjustment period to existing somewhere humans weren’t meant to be. Taking a deep breath, Jo squared her shoulders and kept walking.

By the time she made it back to the mess hall, she thought she was hearing something. It was just a faint hum, almost certainly the life systems and the lights and the artificial gravity and everything else keeping this ship running without even a single person to crew it. The noise was sinking into Jo’s head, though. Like fluorescent lights during a test back in school. You only heard them when you really needed to not be distracted, and then you just couldn’t get rid of the damn noise. Jo wondered if the ring could form earplugs for her, but she didn’t want to risk missing any other unexpected noises. You never knew when the quietest sound would be the only warning you got before something went horribly fucking wrong.

The mess hall looked unchanged. It was still clean and tidy, empty enough that it would look new if it weren’t for the signs of wear on the furniture and the cabinet doors. Jo thought it would almost look cozy if it were occupied. As it was, it just seemed small. Even the low furniture cast long shadows in the now-dimmer light which made the room seem more crowded than it was.

She’d been everywhere forward of the mess hall, so maybe there had been somewhere she’d missed in the back half of the ship. There had to be a cockpit somewhere, or something driving the ship. A navigation room, at least. Or maybe an engine room? Jo thought about trying to use the ring to access information about this type of ship, but she didn’t think she could do that—or if she could, she sure didn’t know how. Nothing for it, then, but to go explore more.

It was fine. Jo just needed to get moving. The mess hall was looking more cramped the longer she stood there. The hallway on the other side of the room seemed dark, but at this point, Jo would welcome the lights going out. At least that would give her something to focus on.

Now that Jo had explored the front half, she realized that the two parts of the ship must have been built differently. The living quarters had been small but clearly laid out. These corridors were a mess, and it seemed even more twisting and asymmetrical than they had walking through the first time. Maybe two different builders had made the ship? But that seemed unlikely. Jo stopped short at a turn so sharp she wasn’t sure how the metal of the corridor accomodated it. Surely she would have remembered this?

The recorder. Right. She’d recorded notes earlier, and Jo didn’t think she had thought to narrate anything until past the mess hall, but it wouldn’t hurt to check. She hit the playback button on the first sound file. There was no sound until suddenly it was full of static so loud she winced. “What the fuck?” Jo paused the recording. Tried playing the second file. The same thing happened: silence, followed by static that obscured any words that might have been recorded. How did she get static on a digital recorder? The @At’s devices were near-flawless. This didn’t seem right.

She meant to look closer, but then the viewport appeared in the corridor ahead of her, dark and open and a beautiful interruption in the endless dull metal of the walls. It barely took Jo a step to reach it, and she took a deep breath staring out at space. The endless dark seemed almost to breathe as she looked out, finding her hand pressed to the clear substance of the port. She wasn’t usually one to get claustrophobic, but this ship was doing a damn good job. Maybe it was the way the rooms and halls clung to each other, themselves cramped into angles just to fit yet another perfectly boring storage space. Maybe it was the low humming. Space was quiet at least.

A sharp beep from her pocket startled her. Weird. That was the noise the recorder made when it ran out. It had practically unlimited memory from Jo’s Earth experience, but it couldn’t record for long stretches at once. It should have been able to last a few minutes, though. She took the recorder off her ear and frowned at it. It blinked up at her, its red light flashing an unusual rhythm. There was no way… But when she started the playback, the device buzzed its note that the recording had ended when twenty minutes ran out.

Jo looked back at the viewport. The idea of venturing back into the warren of the interior of the ship gave her a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. She could always just leave. There was nothing keeping her on this stifling ship, was there? No, she had to at least look around once more. Finish the second walk-through, and then if she still had no clues, then she could head out. It would be nice to feel something other than the stale recycled air.

When she turned back to head down the corridor curving away from the mess hall, it seemed darker. Maybe the power really was going out. If so, finding the engine room could be just the thing Jo needed to figure out what the hell was going on here. The air felt more stale, too, and the buzzing sound louder, which sure seemed like the systems were straining to keep up. Why now, though? The ship had been drifting long enough for the Lantern Corps to pick up multiple reports. That must have taken time, so what had changed now that would cause the systems to start failing?

“Shit,” Jo muttered as she stumbled. She was trying to duck—the ceilings hadn’t been that low when she came through the first time, surely—and only ended up overbalancing. The corridor ahead looked familiar, the curve and narrow metal opening only interrupted by two doors. Jo was sure the doors led to more of the same damn rooms she’d been seeing everywhere else. She hurried forward, wanting to push through. What had been back here? Had she found anything? There was the airlock she’d come in through, and… what else?

It felt like the floor was sloping under her feet. Maybe the anti-grav was failing, too. That was more of a problem, although not as much as it would be if the air systems gave out. Jo focused on the sound of her boots, trying to block out the background hum that felt like it was drilling into her skull. Did the ring have some magic headache cure? She should ask someone about that.

Jo reached the first door, stabbing at the button angrily. It hissed, and ever so slowly, the door slid open. The room inside was dark, but she could see the back of it, the wall so close she thought she could reach out and touch it. How did anyone live on this ship? Cramped was an understatement. Jo blinked as she turned back to the corridor. When she squeezed her eyes tighter, spots slowly revolved in front of her, but when she looked again, the view was the same. _Exactly_ the same.

Just a minute ago, there had been two doors in front of her. Jo was at the first. And yet, there they were. Two doors ahead of her. The corridor looked exactly the same as it had from twenty feet back. What the fuck was happening? This was too much, this wasn’t just some empty spaceship. There was something _happening_ here, something she didn’t understand. Jo practically ran down the hallway. Surely the corridor couldn’t be that long—she would have noticed. She would have.

The hallway receded into the distance, almost as if it was moving and stretching away from her. Jo reached out for the wall and bit back another curse as she found it much closer than she’d expect. Her head was pounding now, the noise from the ship rumbling through her, resonating inside of her skull.

When Jo looked up, she was at a junction in the corridor. She didn’t even bother looking behind her, just flung herself down the right-hand path. It should be closer to the outside of the ship. If she could just see outside, everything would be fine. She needed to get off the ship. There was a slight haze over the lights now, adding a blurry effect to the already dimming atmosphere. The hallway she was in curved around as she’d expected, but she didn’t see a window, just the dull metal of the interior of the ship. She swore, and ran forward.

More corridor, nothing to break it up. Her vision was getting worse, and Jo couldn’t tell if it was the lights going out, or the headache pressing behind her eyes, or something else. It didn’t matter. She needed out. That was it. There was nothing else. The ceiling ahead of her was low enough that she ducked, trying to run and hunch over, and the sound was worse, and she couldn’t tell where she was going.

She stretched her hand out in front of her, barely looking. Her shoulder clipped the wall. She hissed and kept running. The cold metal caught her leg, but she kept moving. She couldn’t stop.

Suddenly, her hand smashed into something directly in front of her. A door. A heavy door, with a view port. There, finally. Out. She could get out this way.

Fumbling around, she found a large button and slammed her hand into it. It caught at an awkward angle against the bones on the side of her hand. The door ahead of her hissed loud enough to be heard over the inescapable humming. There was a wave of air coming toward her, and she caught her breath. She was almost there, she was so, so close to getting out.

The second the door slid enough to let her through, she threw her body out. There was a brief moment of blissful silence, unhindered motion, and the feeling of relief as space stretched wide around her. Her tongue felt strange, and as she opened her mouth to relieve the feeling, something flared around her, piercingly bright and green, and her mind tried to make sense of the sight, but spots danced across her vision, and the last thing she remembered was trying, instinctively, to scream.

\-----

Jo tried to move her arm and got a tingling feeling down her whole side. The pins and needles worsened as she groaned slightly, and she could feel the stiffness in her left side where her arm was curled and pinned between her and a cold metal floor. Opening her eyes, she saw a bright colored blur.

“Where am I?” she croaked.

“Back on our ship, Lantern,” someone said, with the faint buzzing under it that meant the ring was translating for her.

Right. The ship. The ship she’d taken to get to… her eyes flew open again, and she sat up, wincing. “How did I get back? What happened to the dead ship?”

The Ghus she recognized as the captain seemed reluctant to answer, but she said, “The ship is still out there. You… um… we picked you up. You… left the ship and were floating in a green bubble-thing.”

Jo stared. “I did what now?”

Another alien she didn’t recognize said, “We just saw a big green bubble appear in space, but you didn’t move! They had to go pick you up. You were unconscious.”

“I need to see it,” Jo said, suddenly gripped with fear. They helped her up, with no small amount of worried looks, and she stumbled to the nearest viewport.

The abandoned spaceship was just floating there. It looked exactly like it had before she went over to it. She could see light inside the two visible viewports. It didn’t seem to be drifting any more than it had before.

“Lantern,” the captain said. “We had our medic examine you, and other than a very brief exposure to space—which is bad enough!—you had traces of some sort of gas in your system. They couldn’t identify it, but they think it would have affected your brain.”

A gas, affecting her brain. That sure would explain the snatches she was starting to remember. Maybe even would explain the fact that she apparently had thrown herself into the goddamn void of space.

“The cargo hold,” she said, the pieces falling into place. The empty containers. They hadn’t been empty, and Jo’d bet that someone had opened one before her. She felt a little sick to her stomach. Had the former inhabitants of the ship also thrown themselves out of an airlock? Would there be a trail of bodies floating in the path of this ship?

“Lantern?” one of the other crew members asked her. They sounded nervous, but maybe that was just the ring. The _ring_. Fuck. If she hadn’t had the ring, if she’d already gotten a handle on controlling the subconscious constructs—Jo shook her head. She was here, she could make a full report, and someone else could damn well deal with the ship.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Just… let me sit down and catch my breath.” They helped her back to one of the seats, and she collapsed into it gratefully. Everyone seemed to be giving her a wide berth, which was fine with Jo.

Looking up, her attention was caught on the view of dark space outside the viewport. It stretched invitingly ahead of her. Jo didn’t know if she could look away.


End file.
